03-24-26 Manalapan-Englishtown Board Of Education Meeting

001Statement is hereby made that adequate notice of this meeting was given by the prominent posting of said notice in all district schools and other public places the mail and gander hand delivery of said notice to the designated newspapers the Asbury Park Press and the Manalepin Patch filing with the clerk of Manalepin Township and the clerk of English Town Borough. Jessica please call the roll. Mrs. Campo? Here. Mr. Kepprick? Here. Mr. Ferber? Here. Mrs. Herr? Here. Mr. Kane? Here. Mrs. Lucas? Here. Mrs. Parisi is absent. Mr. Singer? Here. And Mr. Tosetti is absent. We have a quorum. Please rise for the flag salute. Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Good evening everyone. All right we are gonna jump I believe right into our presentations starting with the chronic absenteeism. We have

002our ELC principal Mr. Foy here and our middle school principal Dr. Fiorola. Just a reminder the actual reports are on the board agenda if you want to follow along. Yeah so I'm gonna be going through the it's hyperlinked to your agenda I'm gonna be going through the MEMS corrective action plan. Keep in mind I'm not gonna read the entire thing I am gonna highlight some what I think are important information both in the data and in the action steps. Also keep in mind that several times there are two tables one will indicate a 2025 table that's last year's data that was our initial corrective action plan and then that'll be followed by 2026 data which is from the last school year. I know that might sound obviously this is based off last school year you're

003always gonna be one year behind. And so if you take a look at the first page sorry second page table two last year MEMS chronic attendance rate was 12.3 percent. Chronic attendance is defined as students who miss 10% or more of the school year and if your school is has 10% of your students missing 10% you're deemed to be and you need to do a corrective action plan. You'll notice that there's no state average because while we have our data the data for this state isn't live yet. If you want to have a reference point if you look back to last year the state average was just about 15%. I'm sure Ms. Foy will discuss this in her presentation but if you look at state averages chronic attendance seems to be a significantly larger issue

004in the very very early grades and then in the secondary grades. Just to give again keep in mind all the data I'm working with public but it's gonna be a year old at this point but to give context our sending high school their chronic attendance rate is about 27%. Neighboring middle schools 16 16 22 21 18 and 11. So again not that not to dispute that we want more of our students to come to school and I'll go through some of the steps we're trying to get but I think it's also important to have contacts relative to a secondary school because those numbers are sometimes different than other grades. I'm going to skip to the fourth page where there is a parent survey and I'm going to go to the second table the 2026 data

005this is the survey that we sent to district parents this year. Just a few things to highlight we had about 160 responses for MEMS that's slightly lower than we had last year we've had about 214 parents reply last year but still a decent amount of parents replied. Just just to clarify MEMS has about 1,200 students so it was sent out to probably about 2,400 parents. You have sent it to the entire district? Yes but I mean as far as MEMS parents and I take that I think it's 1,167. Just yeah about that there was about 346 respondents district-wide 160 of them were from MEMS. Just about 84% indicated that they were aware of the attendance policy so I thought that was important to know because one of the things we have discussed both in our

006skip committee and in our Rutgers cohort which I'll talk about a little bit is our parents aware of the importance of attendance are they aware of the attendance policy. Another thing sometimes you think well why might students be missing of the respondents only 2.5% indicated their child may miss school because of anxiety or other mental health related concerns so a relatively small percentage. We are in the third year of a grant through the State Department of Education with Rutgers University on increasing mental health services. We were one of 50 schools in New Jersey who received that grant three years ago and we've been working with Rutgers to develop our entire sort of support system and in that support system the things we're looking at are obviously students who are truant we're looking at behavior data

007we're looking at referral to mental health clinician data we're looking at referral to our guidance counselor and so over the last couple weeks the last two years really been working on sort of fleshing out and increasing our tier one tier two and tier three supports for students. We implement our student the month program we also implemented our PBIS program which we call the Bears Initiative and MEMS those are the sort of positive referrals that students get they get entered into a weekly raffle I pull those raffles we get one winner per community students get them for being a bear each of the letter stands or something be brave and then we do a weekly drawing and then we do a monthly drawing so anybody who won a who anybody who got a ticket even if

008you didn't win the week you get to win for the month and it's the idea that if you do something you're caught doing something right we can continue to reward that there's even a prize for the teacher who nominates the monthly award winner three years I'm sorry we're in our fourth year of implementing skill six success for all seventh graders which is sort of a I like the term I'll say a soft skills class where they go over a lot of the things they'll need not just in middle school but in secondary school how to keep agendas how to do oral presentations how to do conflict resolution and then we do our monthly SEL assemblies either with the guidance council or the assistant principal when we say those are tier one we mean that's something

009that all the students get I'll flip through we're gonna go into our tier two and three plans I'm not gonna read through all of these but we do have a system of when it comes to chronic attendance starting with the guidance counselor working our way up to the assistant principals working its way up to me then trying to get to the root of the why we do home visits we do parent coaching for parents who students qualify how do you get your child to school it seems maybe silly to some of us but again the numbers are higher as kids get older I can speak for myself as a parent it is harder to pick them up and just move them now and so we try to work with the parents on that just just

010a side note with some of the students we've been working with for two years the chronic attendance percentage does not show for improvement in individual students so what that means is if a kid was out 50 times last year and they're out 25 times this year that's a win as far as they're improving but they're still a check for being chronically absent at this point I'd like to skip through to table 9 which is the last table our plan is to continue with the whole school PBIS program to continue using the small groups guidance groups to continue to refer the one-to-one counselors one of the things we've discussed is trying if it's not making parents aware of the attendance policy per se but really trying to do communications that emphasize why attendance is important like

011maybe sharing statistics with parents about success in high school and beyond and things like that we also talked about trying to recognize students who are doing the right thing but then also figuring out how may some places do like a perfect attendance which is good but the students who have perfect attendance probably had perfect attendance anyway so it's great to recognize them what about the kid who has nine we just want to keep them from getting double digits so we discussed about either community or homeroom percentage competitions next year making even integrating them into some of the battle of the class stuff we do so that even if someone's absent from homeroom you can still have 97% percent attendance and get some sort of recognition to try and help again to try and help minimize

012the students that are just getting to that cusp and then the last piece to note unfortunately as of 318 which is when I ran the final data for this our chronic absentee rate was roughly eleven point eight percent for this year so it's still unfortunately in the chronic area a little bit lower than last year but still not not exactly in the direction we want to go so that's the sort of overview of the corrective action plan if anything else dr. Santora no I think I had recently seen some people that are looking to go to the state and have the absentee program changed and and one of the areas where it becomes difficult is that we do tell parents if your child is not feeling well they not to come to school but however

013that counts towards chronic absenteeism so it's like kind of a double-edged sword with that you know some of these children are legitimately sick and they shouldn't be at school when you're sick you should be home but then it counts towards that and I know we've talked to parents and sometimes and this is obviously not everyone but sometimes you have a parent that just has a bad year with sickness you know my child had the flu and then they had strep and then they had RSV and the next thing you know they're at 18 days and that's an unfortunate reality and I think when miss Foy talks about her preschooler and kindergartners who are coming to school for the first time you'll see that as well so we have to do these presentations as required by

014state and the statute that gets us here also does not lend its hand to children that are sick and I think that's why you can see that the averages are higher than what's acceptable by state standards but thank you Dr. Fiorello thank you did anyone Dr. Fiorello yeah with regards to the policy and parents understanding of it and you mentioned maybe you know some some different communication to maybe help you know provide more more context and better you know some more info about why it's important and the benefits long-term but is there belief that parents don't understand that you know attendance is critical and to their you know the outcome of their education I don't know that's a hard question to answer because according to the survey parents are well aware of the attendance policy

015and that kind of mirrors the results we had last year that they I wish I could put my finger exactly on it because I do think that you know you have the students who are outliers because of reasons we know we said a student who had 50 absences and we're working with them but the the one that we're trying to figure out or get a better handle on is maybe the student who just misses a random Friday when they're already on 16 days that you know maybe that level of importance equating the percentages because I don't I don't fully understand it so dr. Santor said sometimes you're gonna have things we know about the accident someone gets sick and there's gonna lead to a lot of absences but very often it seems to be part

016of a trending pattern with with many of the chronic absentee students okay thank you I have just one question on slide five the data point it's the 2026 survey data there's a number that's three point seven five percent around parents indicating that they were somewhat familiar with the policy which seems to be a similar response to the row underneath it so I just wasn't sure what the difference is between those two survey data points now and no worries don't the survey was on sort of a Likert scale so six indicate they were aware of the extra pile another they were somewhat familiar okay because the under okay so then the rest of it underneath was a somewhat and very familiar I guess maybe a difference it looks like I left it looks like I left

017descriptor out before aware that would make more sense there thanks I just go ahead I'm sorry you want to go I just had a quick question and I don't if you don't have this answer I'm not needing it now but I'm just curious you had mentioned about it doesn't account for a kid who maybe it was out 50 days last year but it's out 25 this year are we tracking that to see if we're getting progress with like let's say seventh graders going into eighth I know it's hard because it's only a two-year school so with our tier three kids the students who are the students who got end up with tier three counseling so kind of one-on-one with like our school mental health counselor we do track okay I don't have but you're right

018I don't have the numbers oh I don't need I'm just curious if that was something she had mentioned it so I didn't know if we were like I said it's kind of hard because if it's an eighth grader and then they leave to go to high school then like they're not here next year but for a seventh grader it might be interesting to track and see okay thank you I just have a quick question first of all thank you for providing this data as far as the I would say lackluster response for the survey considering how many students we have in the in the school is there a way that we can survey the students to find out specifically why this absenteeism is occurring and I don't know if that's that's that's an option for

019us legally again it's it's information you would share with amongst your group not the public but to try and get a better feel of it because what a parent may check off saying oh yeah they were sick that day I'm not saying that anybody's providing misinformation but we may be had some better insight as to why obviously those children that have been absent for 50 days we they're probably on our radar for a reason and that's why they're absent for 50 days but I mean I understand that the you know the reasonings provided are mostly medical and you know doctors appointments and such which are understandable but I'm just trying to figure out whether or not we can survey the students and maybe we get some better input from the student I jump in on

020that we've always been very reticent to survey children due to parents not wanting their children surveyed that has come up over the years they feel that sometimes we might be fishing for information that the children shouldn't be giving given more of the parent rights to what information is shared that has been brought up a number of times that's an interesting interesting fact and I can appreciate that but when we when we have for example an incident in a school we're allowed to interview a child without a parent there so I would just if it's something we could look into I think it would be something we should probably look into possibly speaking to children about it hey you've been absent 25 times if we're allowed to do it we could do it if a parent

021wants to opt out of it they I think we may get better data and more responses from the students just a thought thank you I see a lot of the the action plans related to actually how we deal with the students in schools do we reach out to families affirmatively for kids who are consistently not showing up it doesn't seem to be relating to sickness like do we call them do we go to their houses we start with a letter then usually a phone call from either the guidance counselor or vice principal then a phone call for me and then usually officer heckle and myself sometimes the vice principal and the guidance counselor will go out to the house and we've done that on numerous occasions and then you know sometimes we obviously have to

022involve other agencies we started five and then there's a series of letters basically in increments of it's not quite five but in increments there's also been circumstances where we've had to take families to court for their child not coming to school and mr. heckle handles all that yeah I should bet yeah officer heckle is great with this anyone else have anything thank you all right thank you dr. Fiorillo hi everybody so ELC is back up here I think a lot of it has to do with the age of the students it actually only reports kindergarten believe it or not preschool is not included in that so it's just kindergarten straight and if you look at the table we are at from last year 13.7 the year before it was 13.4 I will not name any

023of the names but I will say in our area early learning centers that just report kindergarten because I can report them to us one of our close towns is at the same as us 13% another one is 17% and the other one is 23% so we're right in the mix and talking to some of the colleagues really we're all battling sort of the same there's two buckets right vacation not probably reported in the survey and then illness is really the number one that we're talking to parents about that it's either the first time that it's a school experience and they haven't been in school before and they get that illness and then they get another one this year was a prime example of that that we were office about flu and I'm ready to send

024out my next newsletter about hey it's important to come to school and you need to be here and it's important and then we look at the attendance and it's really not appropriate to send that when you have a large population of your school ill when you're housing young students so we are hovering around that 13% right now when we ran the data we are about at 11% this year so we will be in that category again and the survey really mirrors the year before illness being number one we have a small population that returns the survey this year less than the year before 41 people responded illness seems to be it they get the letter from dr. Santora I follow up in September with my own letter about the facts of attendance with an attachment

025of the actual attendance policy since it's their first experience in the district with school parents really don't understand that unexcused versus excused and how that doesn't matter and we talk about it I actually just had a phone conference that yesterday that was yesterday with a parent kind of going through pleading pleading her case of the reasons why they were out and very understandable of why they were out and as a parent I understand that but unfortunately with the policy it doesn't matter it still you know counts as absences and that's why her child is where they are so we had a big conversation about those reasons so I feel like most of my parents are very understanding to the policy it's just what am I supposed to do this is what happened this is where

026my child is so we sort of talk about those things in general and it made us reflect on some of the things that we put in the corrective action plan last year and what we can do differently moving forward and and try to improve that so in the CAP progress plan we basically looked at that and that's kind of where we focused our time the age of the students we're not going to change how many have been in school we're not going to change how often they get sick we're not going to change to a certain degree however we do have our nurse who does germ lessons we do have a school wellness committee that we talk about with the teachers and believe it or not when it's cold and they're inside and they don't

027get outside and we're teaching them to you know sneeze in their elbow and cover their coughs and wash their hands and clean up our little desk space we really do work on healthy habits so something that we're going to look at outside of our normal lessons is we're going to utilize our school wellness committee to add in some kind of fun videos and additional read-alouds that we can embed in those rough months that we saw a lot of sickness this year that kind of can make it a little more fun for the kids to be on top of trying to encourage keeping everything clean and some healthy habits and believe it or not at that age group you know they kind of like that and we're going to work with that so that's something new

028we're going to put in on top of our regular communication with the parents about newsletters that was a barrier this year we hit the winter months and we had them prepared to go out and we're saying how can we send that to our parent population when we have a big percentage that are sending in notes of flu strep RSV not appropriate we're not going to send that out we don't want to mix message to our parents when they have students that are sick at home and they're doing what they're supposed to do we're not looking for them to send sick children to school that's not appropriate so we will continue engaging the population parents students we do a lot of things we want to make sure that they want to come to school that's not

029the issue for the age group you know they want to be here they have a morning meeting we have a buddy system we do a lot of things to engage our students they want to come see their friends they want to be in their classrooms so we will continue doing all those things we will show how important it is to be in school even at this early age they're missing the morning routine that's not great for children every minute that they're there for their foundational skills is very important we need students to be in school however we will focus on the healthy habits and one thing we were going to do and we were just as dr. Ferriero talking about how do we sort of encourage attendance perfect whatever you would like to call it

030with the age group of our students that's rough when you want to give out rewards incentives when quite honestly if it's not illness it's really not a child's fault at five or six so we talked about doing something kind of attendance heroes of the month and just in general either using classrooms who had a great attendance month and being able to also throw in some of those students that we are monitoring whether it's you know an increase in attendance for certain students or lateness or things of that sort but doing it in a more general way so it's not a matter of individual students that's not really appropriate for the age of our students they don't really understand that but that's something we're gonna look at doing to kind of hype it up a little

031more but we know for that age of the students it's not them giving the children a hard time if we have any of that at the beginning of the year we work with the parents to get them in school so those are some additional things we are going to add and you know basically still continue to educate the parents that any other times outside of illness while it might seem small to them if you plan something you're not anticipating that week illness and then guess what another one this was a rough winter so when you add those days cumulatively that gap in learning really does have a major impact and it also you know it's rough for a child to re-enter school we see that with our young children so working with the parents our

032parents are very responsive so I do want to give them credit but because of the age of our students we're gonna front-load a lot of that next year we felt like we did we sent a lot home in September October and then we hit that in illness but we're gonna make a priority of sending that to parents earlier in the school year to get on that right track and and doing the best that we can to share that to make sure that our young students are here and and help you know maintain a healthy environment the best that we can so I'm happy for questions if you have any it's a little more general but if for the schools have do we look at numbers pre COVID and compare those percentages you know and what

033the trends were leading up to the pandemic and then where we are since I'd have to go back and look but we didn't have to report in this way this has been we didn't we didn't have to so the reports for chronic absenteeism are fairly new within the last two years it's actually a QSAC indicator and it's required by statute that districts any school over ten percent must be put on a cap so that's fairly new we do have the ability to go back because all the performance reports that I can even remember back as far as principal do have absenteeism as an indicator and that's actually part of the summative scores I know prior to COVID our admin just in general definitely looked very closely at that data because it was something that impacted

034their overall summative score which was their state ranking if you recall like some of our schools have been like 99.6 top tier within the state and one of those indicators that pushes them above is the chronic absentee being so low prior to COVID I can say some of our schools hovered anywhere from one to five percent the poor ELC and Melissa can speak to this I've always been in this bucket yeah I hate to say has always been higher that is what area and are my contemporaries in in the sending districts have been about the same some have been higher that is I think one of the reasons why we changed our wording which was definitely pre COVID you know it's funny because we had that where we had to leave Main Street so I

035always think of like before we left Main Street Dorner leaves from Main Street and after we leave left Main Street this actually I know where I was so this was before we left Main Street so it was before 2019 when we changed our attendance policy and that was because the wording was so confusing to parents on what was excused and what was unexcused we had state excused versus district excused and nobody understood the difference and we had been looking at our performance reports and it was affecting certain schools where their ratings were not getting rated as high because of attendance and that's why we went with district verified state excused because that was a way to really differentiate and parents would get upset when you call them and say yeah it was excused district-wide but

036not statewide so it still counts towards chronic absenteeism so a lot of thought had went into when we changed how we worded things and the letters that went out and even the initial change to policy was around 2017 2018 where it became the five days with or without a doctor's notice to some degree those first five days or I don't want to say excuse because that's not the proper terminology but not truant where anything after day five does require a doctor's note for the difference to make sure that that language was clear I know even I think it was I was in this role so it was around 2021 when dr. Santora worked with another team of administrators to change some of that wording but then to differentiate the truant from the not truant because

037the truant is what's key that truant is what people go to court for if your child as mrs. Foy and dr. Fiorillo talked about was legitimately sick and legitimately had ongoing things just happen it's a bad year some children can get RSV then the flu then strep then an ear infection things travel for my own children I know you know we take that into consideration and there are attendance committees that will meet around the 15-day mark to say what's our next plan to help support this child because ultimately the goal is if a child is missed however many days beyond 15 to get to 18 for chronic absenteeism we want to support that child we want to make sure that child has what he or she needs to be able to transition back smoothly or

038into the next grade level that's ultimately the goal it's not a gotcha for parents and I think sometimes they feel like it is based on the wording but our hands are tied to a degree because the state does define chronic absenteeism is as 18 days it is an indicator but we also want to make sure that it's not being used and I know I'm gonna say something loaded so I'll prepare myself to take your child on a 10-day vacation during the school year because that attributes to potential gaps as well and there are parents who will say what my child's fine it should be my right to do ABC we recognize that but we also have to follow statute and policies as well and that's where having that standardized set of procedures aligned with policy

039have been really important and impactful because I can say from when we did implement that policy we did see a change in attendance for the better so it's been an ongoing work in progress to say the least you know standards I would I think more of a general question across the district then specific to ELC if a student is absent unexpectedly they have the flu for a number of days is there a standard that we can apply to say how do we support that student very reasonable reason why they're not attending school because we don't want them to get others sick but to ensure that they don't fall behind for that week is there a stand that we have where we send homework home or classwork home and there's a again you can't force them

040I supposed to do the classwork at home but a reasonable expectation that the parent is helping them with that classwork while they're away so when they come back to school after a number of days of unexpected absences they're not super far behind our teachers will always support that and support because they want to make sure that they're up to date as well when they return it's very hard to have a child that's been out for an extended time and return and keep up with the lesson so yes our teachers always support that but it's not as there's not one specific standard that says I know a guideline that was applied if a child was out one day they should have at least one day to make up the work so I think for timeline I

041know I think it's engaged pretty much on the child but if a child missed five days of school due to illness obviously everything from five days wouldn't be made up in a day so it's giving the proper time the teacher would coordinate that parents can come pick up work at any time do they all know it is part of the regulation teachers will cooperate in preparation of home assignments for students who anticipate an absence of five or more days of duration students absent for any reason are expected to make up work missed the parent or student is responsible for requesting the missed assignments and any assistance required teachers will provide makeup assignments as necessary so on a quest by the parent thanks just to piggyback on that I would imagine in the schools that have

042when they could probably also catch up during that time as well yes all their schools have the wind so yeah everybody else anyone else have anything for miss Foy all right thank you miss toy we have our tentative budget review presentation miss wolf cap watches since we last had a projection we had our state aid numbers released which we received just under five hundred thousand dollars additional state aid in certain areas due to I imagine it's due to our enrollment we had a minor tax levy adjustment for enrollment so that was kind of went hand-in-hand with that so I wasn't surprised I was glad to see that it was at least flat or a little higher I was happy to see that we didn't lose anything can I just clarify something I saw in before

043you begin something I saw in the newspapers it had said that Menalpan English town regional has received 489 thousand dollars more than last year and that is true but I think it's also very misleading and misrepresents our story in 2018 we received 18.7 million dollars in state aid and this year we received 8.1 million so although this year we got an extra almost half a million we're still ten and a half million dollars less than we were receiving eight years ago and I think that's important for the public to understand it is that the narrative out there is look we gave this district some more state aid but that's ten and a half million dollars less than eight years ago and if you think of inflation and where we're at now with the cost of

044things it's a significant amount so I just want to make sure that the narrative being put out is recognized as although true a little misleading we were actually eligible for slightly more than that thing maybe another 70,000 but because the state aid increases were capped at 3% we were not granted that extra aid even though it was in our calculations we were capped out 6% 6% right not 3% it was capped 6% increase 3% loss and and also the insane increase in health insurance costs well that's yeah that that's handled the different that's handled through a tax levy adjustment though they don't really look at that as far as the state aid numbers are concerned that's just a adjustment the state allows us to have based on our actual costs that are projected and we've

045got to submit a bunch of information and documentation to support that I spent most of the day to day getting all of the 16 or 18 attachments that have to go tomorrow morning with the budget prepared and double-checked and checked and double-checked because they're really highly scrutinized at the county level but to summarize that our anticipated budget is approximately 110 million dollars just slightly under that and it represents a 5.3 percent increase over the current budget in 25 26 tax levy is increasing by a total of almost 5.6 million which is 6.54 percent it'll be just under 91 million dollars that is driven by the base year adjustment which is kept at 2% plus our enrollment adjustment and then a significant adjustment for like as Janae said rising health care costs actually I was surprised

046we didn't qualify for a higher amount but I understand now why it was basically because our health benefits for the first our health premium is basically we had an 18 month rate lock so for the first time ever in my career here we I don't have to project a second half of the year increase from January 1 to June 30th of 27 that's standard and it's flat so I can see why we may not have qualified for as high of an adjustment as I expected because we didn't see that increase and when you think about how much we had available to us and what we were told we would be saving from the joint insurance fund the amount is about that they're pretty consistent so it makes sense to me I feel a lot better

047once I realized what it was just to remind everyone that's due to the fact that we had left the state plan and found a new plan and everyone moved to the new plan we didn't save money we just cost avoidance like we keep using that term we didn't we really didn't have savings we just have a smaller increase than we would have had otherwise state aid as I said increased by just under five hundred thousand our budgeted fund balance and reserves are very instrumental in balancing this budget with our excess surplus being about 5.8 million which is a little over a million dollars more than we had last year which is high we do need to work on getting that number down additionally we withdrew 1.25 million from the maintenance reserve to fund our maintenance

048activities which has been standard throughout the last probably 15 or 20 years we've been doing that just to ensure that we do have a commitment to maintenance activities in the district as required by the state and we are pulling out of the maintenance reserve about a million dollars for three projects we're doing bleachers at MEMS we are doing the access points the Wi-Fi access points and we are doing what was the other one lockers at Pinebrook yes debt service did see a large increase primarily due to the fact that we have our first payment due on the new issue of bonds that we issued to support the referendum which is what we discussed when we had our town hall meeting there is a three-year period overlap between when this bond started to be repaid and

049when the the last existing bonds from prior referendums are finally paid off there's a three-year gap a three-year overlap so this is your one of that overlap and it will will have a decrease in debt service requirements debt service is almost 11 million about 10.5 million dollars now it went from about 3.6 to 10.5 so it was a significant increase on the appropriation side instructional programs pretty much remain flat special education is what drives a lot of our increases in the instructional lines and in our added district cost lines and our related services and and services provided to the special ed students within the various programs of this of the district we have seen a large increase in that need and we've also seen an increase in the need for just behavioral and overall mental

050health services for just students across the district that whether they're in regular ed or special ed play health benefits are raising about 16% to just about 28 million dollars health benefits are projected the health benefit that's overall all areas of employee benefits that includes severance that includes pension contributions Social Security other contributions and health benefits being the largest portion of that accounting for about 23 million of the 28 million dollars we did see some small reductions in salaries and staffing vacancies were reduced and eliminated from the budget due to attrition we had some small reductions in after-school activities like in our beyond the school day program and summer programs didn't have as much staffing needs because the summer program is virtual this year so that was a slight reduction there capital improvements we have as

051I said about a million dollars in actual projects lockers bleachers in the network as the Wi-Fi network there is an appropriation for four hundred thirty thousand dollars a portion of that we are expecting to be funded with e-rate funds from the federal government we just are in the final stages of that process you'll see some stuff on tonight's agenda to about that is expected to be about 40% we always budget the full amount of the project just in case the funding doesn't come through we did have a situation one year where we had to appeal and it took several years to get it straightened out so in order for me to be able to pay for the project up front I have to have a full appropriation and in that case any money that comes

052back will either reduce the expenditures this year will come back as a reimbursement of a prior year expense in a future year we are buying some equipment about four hundred eighty thousand dollars there's a truck with a sanding assault spreader we have some bus a wheelchair bus we have some adaptive seating and special education student needs some Promethean board replacements and then we are replacing some floor cleaning equipment between burnishers and polishers and scrubbers some potential areas of concern going forward the fact that we are depleting our reserves we've been fortunate with the maintenance reserve and been able to kind of keep that number going in and out each year so we have had money to put back in to cover that I'd like to keep two years worth of withdrawals in the fund at

053the end of the year so I'm hoping that come June we can commit one point two five to go back in and make us whole again any money that is in the capital projects area that is not spent like on the locker project if we did have a change in that need any unspent funds are mandated to go back into the reserve so that will go back in the largest concern basically is going to be health care and you know inflationary cost in the coming years hopefully that starts to level out either through plan modifications that are done at the state level which then will drive the ability to mirror those kinds of things in in public or in private programs that's typically how it happens it starts with the state program I don't foresee

054the state coming through and mandating changes much like they did with contributions both of the contribution laws are sunsetting we'll see if anything replaces that in the future otherwise it's up to negotiations still rebounding from the s2 funding impact the loss of aid as Nicole said over the years that did take a significant hit to our ability to maintain our buildings which was why we needed the large referendum hopefully we can keep ahead of that going forward and then just volatility within special education it seems like that's a large area that we're seeing increases and unexpected costs arise during the school year so trying to adapt to that as they arise is difficult especially when you like say this far into the school year when most of your expenditures have been made to try to

055like add staffing now or out of district placements it can be can be a little more difficult but that's that I did also take a look quick look at the debt service and right now projecting increases I have to finalize the numbers as once the budgets finalized but we're projecting tax increase rate increases in both Menalpan and English town the the main portion of that is related to the referendum bonds it's the increase in the debt service is driving the increase as opposed to increases in the operating budget the increase in the operating budget is a small percentage of the increase in the tax rate I'm seeing as some of these new developments come online too in the future that will level that out as well and I know there's more coming from what we

056understand correct so do we have any questions important to realize when we talk about percentages it's a percent of our total budget it's not the percent of someone's taxes at home so that's spread out amongst the entire community so as we have a hundred and sixty more development units in this development and a hundred more units in this development we just found out about another development the other day that's another hundred and sixty units that gets divided amongst all that too which is I think one of the reasons why we haven't estimated yet because we're not fully aware of right and that's the thing I think people think that well you've got all this all this development you know that's just aid to you I think even when we had to sit down with English

057town at one point they said well you've got all these developments coming online like but that's not how you fund me I set a levy how it doesn't matter what the assessed value is of your community it's my levy my levy is capped so I can only go up by a certain percent it's how broad you spread that levy and that will either increase or decrease the impact on an individual home as Nicole said so we really don't have control over that I can't control the tax rate I can only control what our budget is based on what our needs are and that's where we are for right now if anything in that line changes I'll let you know this is only tentative adoption what this allows right now is for me to go on

058to the state software as soon as we're done with this meeting and press the submit button once the budget is submitted it's basically locked and it goes to the county office for review and approval as I said there are probably 16 or 17 documents that go with it supporting position control health benefits debt service there's an unlit knee of spreadsheets that they asked for in support of our numbers and I know our county associate executive business official will review every one of them she's very very attentive to that she really gets into the into the the meat of the of the numbers until she approves it it really can't go anywhere we can't really do anything with it they do have to approve our budget sometime before April 24th I believe is the deadline April

0592nd April 20th April 20th is a deadline so as we are towards the end of the tentative budget adoption cycle it does end on Friday we are probably in the mix with a lot of districts that either approved last night tonight or tomorrow night and it depends on just how many she has to review and where we fall out in that in the you know the the stack of budgets to review as to when we might get our our information we are in a little bit of a better position this year because we don't have to advertise in the Asbury Park Press which always took some time because we had we have this advertisement once the budgets approved I have to go in and print off this public budget advertisement and that takes a little

060while to manipulate and get it to look and read write and it always took a few days to get that advertised in the paper now we are able to post it on our website which is much easier much quicker so we do have a little bit of a breathing room there it's not such a you know tenuous time where we're waiting for her approval and waiting oh my god I'm gonna miss you know the deadline to pull the ad so Ronnie will you explain what then happens in May with the budget in May we'll have a public hearing my mandatory so what we Nicole and I will create a presentation and we'll go over a bunch of information that's in the budget things that have been removed added tax rates levy information historical if you

061want to look back last year's adoption was I believe May 6th you can go back to those meeting minutes and then you'll see and I think it's more in the board video I don't think we have an attachment on the agenda but if anybody wants to let me know I can send it to you I sent it out to the whole community I was sent out to the whole okay so yeah so that's so basically we'll go through that and then we'll have a final adoption we do you have the ability to make changes between now and then but anything that we do change must be discussed at the public hearing and it must be noticed in the approving resolutions what we've changed from tentative to final because essentially this is what Cindy's going to

062look at and approve and if you make any changes we have to detail what line item and some explanation as to why things are changing but there is the ability to do that if something comes up that we didn't anticipate or we need to shift money around a little bit we can do that and then that'll then it'll be finalized and then we can get it into our counting software and we can start making purchases and move on for next year I do want to just follow up on what I said earlier one of the things this district has done really well when we were one of the s2 districts was we planned accordingly and we decided where our priorities were and that's one of the reasons why we had to go out to referendum

063because we prioritized education over some of our facilities and you know we always thank the community so much for supporting us on that and and passing the referendum and allowing us to make this district everything that it is right a great learning environment for all children but now you're seeing other districts start to crash and I and I think when some of the budget hearings that I had went to at the state level that was what some people had said right the s2 districts are here now saying we can't afford to run but within a few years this is going to be statewide everywhere and we weren't really heard and now you're you're seeing in the papers about different districts and they have to close a school they have to cancel transportation they have to

064cancel sports limiting like 30 positions in a clip I don't want us to because we planned because we worked with our community because the board works so well with us to make us stay afloat I don't want to lose our narrative in that story we were one of the biggest districts hit by s2 and I don't want to be because we hadn't to do tragic things that undermines students education to not be recognized to as a district that lost a ton of state funding and have had to make do with what they've gotten and I think that's important to keep getting out there to the public you know you hear about well look what happened to this district some of these districts haven't even lost the amount that we've lost you know and and I

065don't want us because we were able to sustain to not if something changes in the funding formula to not be considered or to be put in because we're not in headlines for doing massive reductions right now we have been sometimes it you know it doesn't look like it's it's it's been a planning model but it has been a planning model we have been very cognizant to not just look at the year we're budgeting for but to look at the years going forward and to try to really structure any time we've been given any additional funding through tax levy adjustments we try to always always spend it to its highest efficiency and and we're very frugal with it we don't frivolously make purchases we are very deliberate in what we do with the money any questions

066on the first page you were going through the first page you mentioned we were taking a lot of money from something I think you were talking about the surplus the surplus the fund balance and then you said something about how we'd have to get that down in the future how would we do that given all the constraints that you've talked about it's not easy and that's something that we always every year we go for a mid-year budget review it's one of the first things that our county office says you know you you you are you do have surplus in your budget we've been trying very hard to break the cycle it's it's a conscious effort it's being able to do what we've done in the past so we have gone to cap and that's a

067big help I know some of the districts that are having trouble now have had boards that would not allow them to go to cap so by by the board allowing us to take advantage of tax levy adjustments that does help a lot so it's things like that it's just trying to always be ahead of the curve a little bit and just looking to the future I know eventually we're leaving here you know the Main Street building so while you don't see a revenue item in here I didn't I wouldn't want to put a revenue item in here because that would just be it would not have it for future years I think we don't know the amount we have a more finalized idea what Main Street might be able to be sold for that will

068come as revenue and that will go to surplus and then that will help fill this budget the little pocket of money that we look to fund our budget with in 27 28 so it's things like that just always having like a forward forward view and keeping in mind of where we are and where we're going and what our needs might be thank you Ronnie I read something early and I can't remember where it was probably something you sent out related to our interest earnings and going back to our debt service it's on the agenda tonight okay that's where I read it yeah and so that's based on the money that we're still holding from the referendum correct right so within give or take a year year and a half or so or two that money

069is going to be spent or at least the vast majority of it right so that it we're no longer gonna be earning that interest because we're not holding on to that anymore so in the meantime is it mandatory is it required that any interest earn must go back to the debt service it yes it really should I mean there are you can put it in your general I believe I'm not a hundred percent sure but I believe from conversations I've had with a couple other BA's that you could put it in your general fund as revenue but I would never recommend doing that because it's a again it's a it's a one-time source of revenue that's you don't ever want to depend on that it's gonna go away it won't be there for forever especially

070since we have such a short this isn't like a five-year construction plan we're looking at three years probably max so by then the majority of the money will be spent and will be generating interest I'll have interest in June I'll know the exact amount that we have to plug into the the budget I'll be building in the future now that actually reflect in the community the taxpayers tax it'll reduce the following year it'll adjust it'll reduce the time in real time bird for debt service yes I can I could have it's it's hard to read some of the investment statements because don't forget they're they're not just like invested in a in a checking account that's earning interest and it's a I get this amount every month I'm getting we're buying bonds we're selling you

071know different things through a managed program I don't manage it we have a third-party administrator actually PNC is managing it we did an RFP for that and there's accrued interest there's all a lot of things that fluctuate depending on what we're buying what we're selling what we're owning so I think at the end of the year I'll have a better sense in June of what the actual earnings are okay great thank you so much I have a few questions first of all thank you I just want to understand a couple things security went up $200,000 yes from the last spreadsheet we were provided are we allowed to disclose what that additional $200,000 was for yes I sent an email to the board basically we are looking to replace our door access controls oh okay I

072thought that's okay I just I didn't know if that was yes okay okay thank you um I realized that we're we're contemplating purchasing new lockers for Pinebrook and the bleachers for MEMS my concern is that we're talking about potentially down the road having the redistrict and potentially trying to see where students are going to be and if we potentially have to use Pinebrook for some other use and it's not a school that would use lockers I just can't see why we'd be spending the money on this to buy lockers and and I say that knowing that once this budget is approved you could then go and start your process to make these purchases so I just want to understand we would do that until we knew what was going on at what point do we

073make that determination I guess I don't understand we have all year to spend that money we can spend it we can cut a purchase order next June if we want to it we have we have as long as we need never planned on doing the projects early in the school year both those projects right now with the referendum we don't have the ability to do all those projects this summer they were already going to be put on hold so the lockers and the bleachers were going to put on hold towards the end of the year probably put a bid a word out in the springtime if we're not doing them under like a cooperative but I think right now I don't know that we can because of the new law there's a new law affecting

074prevailing wage and public works contracts so right now we can't use co-ops for that so we would have to do a bid for that I just can't see approving something like that when we're contemplating reshuffling not that not that we're you know there's a discussion of putting together you know some type of discussion about that so if that does happen I'd hate to see we approve something and then we go and purchase it and then a year later we decide well we may have to reshuffle things that that's that's just one of my concerns also I've asked this before I've never seen any type of five-year capital improvement plan for the district I feel like making these large purchases should be part of some type of capital improvement plan and and I've I've been told

075that we have a list of items and I've never seen that list I think that it's not to our benefit and to the taxpayers benefit to just we pick three items I don't see any type of five-year plan and and I don't know if I'm beating a dead horse but well I'm a planner so I'd like to see some type of plan Eric I'd like to I'd like to recall the discussion that we had last time and point out the fact that Nicole just said we lost ten million dollars in aid in the last eight years we have the referendum which is going to allow us to make the necessary required At this time I don't think that we could come up with the five-year capital plan that you're asking for because as you saw

076once again I'll get to work and the fact that Newark I know it's apples to oranges has almost 1.4 billion dollars in state aid an increase of 4.5 percent for an additional 40 million dollars a district like that might be able to do what you want to do right now I'd also like to point out where mr. Ferber noted that the cost per student is roughly $17,000 I would challenge any district in the state over 650 districts to show me the success that they have had with that type of investment and funding for the cost of student I don't want to misspeak on numbers but there is a neighboring city that's having the same discussion that we're having right now tonight about their budget and they are in a far worse situation than we are

077I understand and I totally grasp the concept and the want to have a five-year capital plan but we have to look at what we have lost in eight years so I know you're beating a dead horse and I'm not giving pushback to you but like bro we've got a we're swimming upstream right now and we're doing the best we can and I have sat here for five years and watched Nicole and ran Ronnie I don't know why where Randy came from successfully maneuver every single obstacle placed in their place by the government in Trenton I think they need to be applauded I think the community needs to understand the financial restraints that have been put on us and dude I'm right there with you on a five-year plan but we can't do it right now

078like to keep asking Nicole and Ronnie to say hey give me this plan give me this set up a work group to set this it's not feasible right now like it's not well if I could just if I could just I'm sorry today you know I understand what you're saying I appreciate what you're saying the point is very simple is that without a plan there's no plan okay and and and you know I could get into the nitty-gritty and saying okay we need lockers in Pinebrook can you tell me the last five years how much we've spent to replace any broken lockers I didn't say I disagreed with you if we're gonna have a redistrict I'm not I'm not saying I disagree with you what I'm saying is you don't take this the wrong way

079okay when I make this next comment because it might come out the wrong way there's of us at this table have been sitting here for five years dealing with the lack of funds every single year and I don't think that anybody at this table has been here two three four five six eight however long I mean Christine's not here I think it's 13 years she's been here right and to come in with this being your fifth meeting and say give me this we don't have a plan like that's a slap in the face to those of us that have been making this work and I think that I see what you're doing I see what you're trying to do I applaud it and I don't think we don't have a plan I think that it's

080not as crystal clear as what you want right like I guarantee you and Nicole and Ronnie have thought ad nauseam on how do we can better this five to ten years down the road I just don't think you're gonna get the exact Ram of parameters of what you're looking for I'm not making excuses I'm telling you like this is not an easy time and I think we did create a four-year plan that was the referendum the board sat down with administration we had a full audit done of all of our district and our facilities and we prioritized what needed to be done I'm not sure about the lockers but I'm ninety nine point nine percent sure the bleachers were included as an area and need to improve but we had chosen not to put them

081into the referendum because we focused on larger scaled items so we are falling back on the audit that we did and what we met as a referendum committee to discuss and prioritize so it may not be a five-year plan but it was definitely a four-year plan because we're going into a year so I guess that should have been shared with us so that we have an idea you know what what the district was looking at as far as what should be improved I understand there's a plan to do the referendum what you know we're dealing with taxpayer money here and we have to be very cognizant I know everybody who sits up here is very cognizant about you not seen the referendum plan I mean the the presentations the depth I'm sure that Nicole shared

082it with you like everything that's happening in the referendum like I'm not trying to go tit-for-tat and battle you do like I'm really not but like Joe blow off the street that paid attention could understand what we're doing what we're building how much HVACs are why we did this like it's it's there dude like it's not like I said it's not the parameters I think you're looking for but there is a three to four year plan and dude like like I said it's been there and I'm sure that Nicole or Ronnie will share with you if they didn't share with you already like the in-depth thousand page paper portfolio that Ryan Green worked at Nazium on with us like it's dude every single detail you want for the next three years in this district is

083in that book in that binder there is there is a thing that the state has is called the long-range facilities plan and when we pass the referendum or we actually propose a referendum we had to update the long-range facility plan for all of the projects that we are including anything that wasn't in there that we wanted to do actually there's a line in the budget it's called the recap of balances but in the budget document there is a line where I have to enter the amount of projects the estimated cost of completing all the projects in the long-range facility plan it is 144 million dollars to complete the remaining not including the hundred that includes 115 plus others so there's another 30 million dollars worth of projects that could be completed over in like the

084next in like a five to ten year cycle that does exist unfortunately the database is so old that most people don't know how to get into it my architects can get into it I've never I have had no success in getting into it the state keeps promising us a new platform for the last five or six years it keeps getting delayed it keeps getting delayed it keeps getting delayed which is when you start to deal with the state you'll understand that's pretty much what you get you get lots of promises and they don't ever follow through so we had the architects we commissioned a study probably two years before the referendum was passed and it's a binder if you want to come into the office I have copies of it you can you can even

085take one if you want because I don't I have more than I need so that's where we started we looked at that we created a massive spreadsheet where they costed all that out and then as Nicole said we prioritized what we needed to do we have not just had deferred maintenance since the start of s2 we have had deferred maintenance in this district since like the 910 school year and we had our first financial crisis where the state came in and took 1.5 million dollars of our surplus so from that point forward it got to the point like why are we going through a plan of projecting out we're gonna do this this this and this because the money was never there we something would break and we'd have to fix it and then that

086capital project didn't get done so we moved more to a break-and-fix model getting by with what we had now we're in a position where all of our older things are being accounted for and being adjusted and we're actually have been very successful in our bidding and our results of our bid openings where we have some extra funds to do extra projects which we are looking at and prioritizing and then in the coming weeks we're going to take a look at what's available and what we have because we have one more original bid project to do and then once that's awarded we'll know exactly what we have to deal with beyond that we are also doing an ESIP which has always been considered as part of the referendum process so once we're doing this we're starting

087to work on the ESIP part of it that is going to accomplish a lot of other smaller projects that were not really large enough or did not have a long enough lifespan to be put into the referendum when you deal with with items in a referendum everything that we do has a useful life and it has an estimated useful life well the average useful life of the items in the referendum dictate the number of years you can pay the bonds back over so if you start putting into a bond referendum items that only in the last 10 years instead of being able to pay the bonds off in 20 years I'm going to pay them off in 10 which is going to increase the debt service and the load on the community so that's not

088smart I've always make this this analogy like you wouldn't go out and buy a Happy Meal using a home equity loan so that's kind of the mentality we have to what's big enough to include in the home equity loan and what's big enough to try to finance and fund another joy in other ways the ESIP is going to be part of that so we've got we have that coming so it's not like we don't have a plan we we have a plan the plan is the referendum for the next five years and the ESIP and then beyond that we're going to do small break and fixes as we're seeing the bleachers are a safety hazard the lockers if we decide that we are not going to change the grade level configuration of Pinebrook we have

089all year next year to do that we can issue an award as late as the last meeting in June have the board award the purchase issue the purchase order the work can be done after the fact we're not going to rush it and if we're in a position where we're not sure we just don't do the project it goes back into fund balance and I pull it back out next year it really is not there's no harm no foul to be perfectly honest there's no obligation to spend it it is obligated to go back into the capital capital reserve fund if we don't spend it perfect example several years ago we talked about putting an addition not an addition but taking over parts of men's trying to get out of Main Street 2.7 million dollars

090we're going to spend and then we come to find out that these new developments coming on down online down off of 33 we don't know what we're going to do because there's we don't know what kind of impact it's going to have on students so what do we do we pulled the plug that's what we do and that's if we have to do that that's what we'll do I'm not concerned about that at all it is totally flexible there's no no mandate to do it once we move forward with this budget it just provides flexibility to do it if the conditions are such that we can thank you Janay you just wanted to chime in yeah I was just gonna say you know I think two things can be true at the same time right

091yes there are a lot of new people coming into the community that were not here when the whole referendum was getting done right we have a lot of new people in the district right so I I can definitely appreciate what we've done here you know I've been a member of this community my whole life and the fact that we've been able to keep this level of our schools through what we've been put through in this town I think is amazing and definitely not shortchanging Nicole and Ronnie and all the work and I know you know it inside and out but I think like you said we're not going to put these big things into the referendum so it's good to also have on our radar these smaller items that we want to you know wish

092wish wish list items essentially that we can use for capex you know the former the former buildings and grounds director before mr. Lascoe he would come before the board every year with a list of things and then guess what he'd be the same item as the following year and this because the money just wasn't there to do them unfortunately so I just want to clarify two points the issue with the bleachers at Ben's is their opening and closing mechanisms they are not unsafe to go on and we just had all those offensive mems with hundreds of people on them they are not unsafe to go on them but it's becoming unsafe to open and close them they're actually I asked Jeff they're the originals from the building when we did the referendum we chose not

093to include him at that time which was four years ago Jeff said oh yeah they can probably hold off a little longer but now it's four years later so it's not about like we didn't put children on on safe leaders make sure that's very clear it has to do with how the mechanism that opens and closes up and like we talked about at the last meeting I think we talked about the lockers as well we did used to have a plan where we rotated updating lockers it was every year we updated a certain amount of lockers primarily at mems versus Pinebrook and when in 2018 those were some of the things that we put to a halt we stopped doing some of that proactive work and that lasts you so long one of the reasons

094why we went out for referendum but that is one of the ways that we always kept the building there are budget being able to balance is that some of those proactive measures that we were able to do when we had money we could had to not do anymore and we used to put about $50,000 a year in the budget habitually every year coming out of the Capital Reserve to do locker replacements and then again that got to the point like where we couldn't put funds into it there wasn't everything went to education into and program and instruction and we weren't able to put funds into the Capital Reserve Fund we're just getting to a point now in the last year or so where we've been able to put a little bit of funding into it

095thank you I don't know if I mentioned before like I met with dr. Santora and and Ronnie and they were very informative of the process and answered a lot of my questions so thank you for that I just have a couple more questions and I'll be done the the 5.7 million we're using in surplus that will leave us with how much in surplus the the amount that the state allows us to have at 2% oh that 2% okay so we're using 5.7 of surplus and we're using a million from each of our or 1.2 and 1 million from our those accounts so without that seven million dollars roughly we'd be in trouble so so so you know I just just you know that really looking forward to next year the following year and stuff we

096may not have 5.7 million dollars or 7 million dollars to spend and and that's why I'm cautious when I talk about when we talk about spending this additional you know four or five hundred thousand dollars for these for these large ticket items such as lockers such as bleachers I understand you're telling me the mechanism to roll them out that's coming out of dedicated funds so it can't be used for anything but no I understand that but but so the let's just say it's 5.7 million we didn't have we won't have that next year and and and I'm just concerned about that for next year what's gonna happen next year with the with the growth of the community with with with you know you know we lost you know we we reduced jobs through attrition retirements

097and such but I don't know of any administrative jobs that were eliminated through attrition or anything like that I think Ronnie misspoke I did not eliminate any positions that are currently it was more of a shift we did shifts to different so this is the first year that we did not eliminate any and I'm sorry I should have okay when you first said it we we are shifting different positions into different departments but we have not actually cut any positions out of the budget okay okay thanks for clarifying that but I'm just concerned and I think everybody up here is concerned and should be concerned and the public should be concerned that without that five point seven million dollar surplus we'd be in trouble here and and looking ahead we potentially could be in serious

098trouble and and that's what I'm concerned with buying these big ticket and I understand those that two million doesn't come from that surplus but any other large ticket items that we're purchasing you know that we have to do you know we you know dr. centaur explained we don't do a zero budget balancing a zero budget approach where we don't start from the bottom up where I came from in government that's what we did we don't have any committees to to really sit down and and look over this stuff so so the essentially what happens here is the superintendent the the business administrator and the staff put together this budget presented to us as a board but we really have no besides me meeting with you or sending an email and asking questions we really have

099no in depth you know view of the of the budget and it makes it very difficult knowing that if we didn't have that five point seven million dollars we'd be like every other district around us and I'm just worried that we need to start preparing for next year the following year the following year the following year for as long as I'm here a very bouts this year we could potentially be and see some catastrophic cuts that's what I'm concerned with yes that's what Ronnie and I talk about daily every year every year we talk about having to get that that down we understand that one of the things that we don't do that I think other districts do is we do cut off the budget in January and everything after that needs our approval so

100we're not frivolously spending money just because money's there well it all needs our approval everything every purchase goes through goes through Nicole and myself it goes through department level approval if the department wants it they have the ability to say no bypass me you know I'm the one initiating the purchases secretaries entering it it can go to either Jodi or Nicole and then it comes to me as a final approver so we always review it says they have to go through additional step of justifying to me why it's necessary to buy it now why didn't they buy it earlier in the year is it is it something that they ran of like ran out of like toner for a printer but like to go buy something frivolous at this point not only say frivolous we

101don't buy anything frivolous but but something that might not be as urgent if you didn't need it till this point in the year why do you need it now save it and we'll buy it from you next year so we do do that we do cut the budget off in that basically in January or sometimes December sometimes even earlier and we've had really bad years we don't have a district where in June people are like oh I still have two hundred thousand dollars in my account I'm gonna buy XYZ because everybody will like that what'd you say but we don't allow that right so so that's one of the reasons why we do end with a surplus is because we're very conservative of how we spend our money and you know we if we weren't

102conservative we could not have a surplus understood and again I appreciate everything you're doing I'm not I'm not criticizing I'm just asking questions I'm up here just like everybody else is we represent the taxpayers and we have to we have to look out for that I have two more questions and I'll be done what is going to be the total budget I know the general fund appropriation but what is the total budget and what is attacked at tax implication to the on the agenda the total budget is in the agenda it's 120 yes I just I just want to make sure I read that right it's 121 million dollars roughly yes okay and then what is the implication to the taxpayer in Manaup and in English town for the assessed home what is their increase

103going to be based on this but a lot of that information will be in the presentation for public hearing that's what that if you look at the one that I sent you earlier that information is all included in that as I said earlier we are looking at an increase in Manaup in a tax rate increase in Manaup in of three point eight cents and four point eight cents in English town that's with the additional debt service of that of that of that increase in Manaup in of the three point eight cent increase two point seven of it is directly related to the new bond issue in minute in English town of the four point eight cent increase four cents of that is directly related to the referendum bond debt service so without the new debt

104service English I would have gone up eight tenths of a cent and been helping 1.1 cent right which is and even coming off of the last couple years we've actually had rate decreases because of increases in assessed values so I'm not seeing it as a as a huge impact because we've had impacts and increases rate increases larger than this in the past so I mean it is and again the once the debt service is in the referendum was approved that becomes like it has to be outside of discussions because I can't change that that's no I understand and I appreciate but but as far as dollars and cents can you tell me is it going to go up $200 per assessed value in the Manaup and residence house like can you give me a dollar

105figure or do we have to wait till that I'll do that I'll do that with the with the presentation we haven't sort of working on the presentation so and I'm not trying to be smart you don't have that number right now approximately or the problem is in the past we used to try to provide that information more accurately but because Monmouth County is on a pilot program for assessing assessing properties so that is makes it very difficult for me to say that if you're assessed now at this this is what your rates gonna be I can tell you how to take your assessed value and calculate what your taxes are going to be and look at it compared to what the rate is now versus what I'm projecting the rate to be I am I

106have only two pieces of information that I know are certain I know our tax levy and I know the preliminary assessed value that I get from the county office from the county tax board that's all I know I don't like to project anything further than that because it it's gotten more difficult to do under this pilot program understood and I say familiar with the pilot program because obviously my house in Manaup and gets reassessed every year it seems like they come by to charge me more but I guess my last point is just that I feel like we should know at today what the dollar impact is going to be to the taxpayer pending that it could change in three months like if that make if that makes any sense like I know you're saying

107the four point eight cents and the three point eight cents for Manaup and four point eight for English town I just feel like we should have prepared tonight to be able to say on the assessed value like you usually see and we'll see if that that may meeting if it was today this is what it would be so that we could have an idea of what it is and the public can have idea what it is but I'll wait to that meeting Ronnie didn't you just give them a number on what it is right I have I have I have I have the estimated I went through the half the she's got an estimated right there I anticipated this for tonight I don't usually have this information available for this meeting I have it somewhere

108between because just like I said I spent all day today just getting the documentation together so to put something like this together I wanted to make sure I could think it through and it was accurate but I anticipated having a question about that so I know that with the additional debt service the tax rate for English town I am projecting to be eight point three seven point eight three seven cents per hundred of assessed value I am projecting that Manaup and be point eight zero seven cents all right per hundred it's eight point oh seven cents per hundred of assessed value I can send you I got that point I guess I was just looking for the dollar amount so I didn't have you can't you got to know what the value of the house

109is dude you're your value and I understand that one by one but here you go here's your here's what your estimated taxes get you got a you got to do the math on what your house is assessed at there's an average house mersace every one of us has a different assessed value of the house understood Jesse what I'm just so like there's an average of the assessment there's an average household in Manaup and based on the average assessment that's what I was asking but I digress dude come on I don't have any other questions thank you that'll all come I mean I can send you what I have here now too if you want to take a look at it and I can tell you how to take this information and and and project it

110onto your own property how to do the calculation all right Eric just to follow up I share your sentiments and I think everyone else does in terms of the concerns going forward not having the surplus that we have right now so you know you're absolutely right to have that you know kind of top of your mind and and being concerned about that moving forward so you know I share I share that with you and I think everyone else does also I know Nicole and Ronnie you know each sleep breathe that every day throughout the year and and I do think based on the last come I think was that at the last meeting when this came up about a four-year or five-year plan and I think it makes a lot of sense but I think

111it's that you know the timing of getting to that and I don't think right now is that time but I do think it is a necessary you know we want to tackle it and we want to have that in front of us but I think we got to get to that point and I think right now still being kind of like the midst of the referendum projects that you know we need to get through that before we could get to the next step and we're checking stuff off the list as we as we complete the projects that we have now and then we're also like as we said in doing a summer three a year three of projects we still have to determine that which will check even more projects off the to-do list so

112it's it's it's kind of work in progress and there's so much moving parts right now and so much activity it's it's time consuming it's it's it's life-consuming at this point Ronnie what were those numbers again please how about I send you the sheet that'll be no I just I'm going to do the math for Eric real quick on a median house of seven hundred sixty one thousand dollars in Monop in four hundred eighty five thousand dollars in the English town so Eric can have the answer you want thank you English town is point zero eight seven oh sorry point eight zero seven per one hundred of assessed value English town is point eight three seven of one hundred dollars assessed value thank you thank you Ronnie and Ronnie you know I'm perfectly fine at any

113time for you to you know if in fact don't have certain information available and ready to not feel like you have to you know be under the gun and do it right there and rush and potentially make a mistake and give out the wrong information that's why I'd rather you know it be done the right way all right anybody else have any other questions or comments related to the budget and now Monop in a six thousand one hundred forty one dollars and twenty one cents estimated would anyone else like to know for their house what it is all right thank you that's that's just our part of the levy I can't say what English town is gonna be I mean I would it's time we no more questions or comments related to the budget then

114we're gonna move on to the next all right all right great thank you thank you for putting this together Ronnie you're welcome all right I think we are going to going to exact now all right we are back thank you everyone for your patience okay changes and revisions item g4 was added resolution affirming the decision of the superintendent in the HIV matter involving student number four two five one five I unlock that so that is now an active agenda item okay thank you all right moving on any nothing else right no that was it thank you public comment seeing that there is only all there are two people anyone have anything today tonight public comment no all right thank you for the board's information anyone have any questions on anything f1 through five anything no

115all right we will move into our action items starting with the administration can I have a motion and a second on g1 through g4 please Jesse and Jamie this is Campo yes mr. Capric yes mr. Ferber yes this is her yes mr. Cain yes this is Lucas yes mr. singer yes mr. to study I'm a yes on g1 through g3 and a no on g4 please motion passes thank you can I have a motion a second on items h1 through 8 on our tentative adoption of the budget and mr. Capric any questions guys mr. Capric yes mr. Ferber yes mrs. her yes mr. Cain yes mrs. Lucas yes mr. singer no no on all of them mr. to study yes on all of them and mrs. Campo yes motion passes thank you I have a

116motion and a second on business items I won through 15 please this is her and mrs. Lucas thank you any questions any questions no mr. Ferber yes mrs. her yes mr. Cain yes mrs. Lucas yes mr. singer I won through 15 the business items make sure I'm on the right page here sure no on 15 yes on everything else mr. to study yes mrs. Campo yes mr. Capric I'm gonna abstain on I run and I ate abstain on I wanted abstain on I ate yes to the remainder motion passes thank you actually I want to go back a second I did mean to comment on the donations so I wanted to just thank both the PTA for from Wimrock as well as the foundation for MERS for the grants so thank you to everyone for

117that I did have a question also regarding seven the PTA the PTA donation for the water fountain so something like that just kind of stood out to me as to like wouldn't that be something that we would normally be accounting for or planning for right things like water fountains and you know how does that end up being something that the foundation the PTA is donating we did apply for a grant for that I don't know why Rebecca's PTA it's fancy got it okay thank you all right curriculum items j1 can I have a motion in a second please mr. Cain and mrs. Campo no questions from anybody okay mrs. hurt yes mr. Cain yes mrs. Lucas yes mr. singer mr. to study yes mrs. Campo yes mr. Capric yes mr. Ferber yes motion passes thank

118you I have a motion in a second on personnel items K 1 through 18 please mrs. her mr. to study I'm a little I'm a little slow today it's 1015 okay mr. Cain yes mrs. Lucas yes mr. singer yes mr. to study yes mrs. Campo yes mr. Capric yes mr. Ferber yes and mrs. her yes thank you and can we have a motion in a second on student matters item l1 please mr. singer mr. Capric anything no mrs. Lucas yes mr. singer mr. to study I forgot to ask a question I don't remember hearing it asked so just so I'm doing math for Marines the right way this is 33,000 just for the end of the school year all right thanks yes mrs. Campo yes mr. Capric yes mr. Ferber yes mrs. her yes and

119mr. Cain yes thank you okay we can move on to new and old we're getting there all right starting with you Jamie anything tonight yes I will try to make it quick I did want to congratulate all of the Jersey Shore science fair winners I believe out of the 19 children that entered 17 of them place we had many categories I'm not going to read them all where we had first second and third place and some honorable mentions so congratulations to all of the children and their teachers who did that hats off to them I wasn't here at the last meeting but just to give a CPEC update with some of their events they did have their anxiety virtual meeting there was about probably 30 or so 35 people in attendance I think that went

120well I did miss the blue envelope event that was at Menalpen High School on March 10th so I'm not sure how that went but I did have something going on that evening how was that it was great it's really informative I I wish more people would go there's a ton of programs that Menalpen PD as well as the county offer that more people should know about taking yes and I do believe that there were people there from I don't know if it's sore I might get that wrong the name but it's for for children when they become adults that have special needs and I believe that's an email was sent out to some of the parents about getting in touch with Lynn Becker and stuff like that so there are a plethora of resources available

121and trust me I can speak from experience your children will be in high school and driving age and getting ready to graduate a lot sooner than you'd like to think so it it's something to think about there is another virtual training on April 8th and I think this one's really important so if anyone sees this after the fact I do think that I know that something went out on this as well it's a virtual training for siblings of students with disabilities and that was something at some of the CPAC meetings that parents have really requested and I wish that I had access to that when my kid was younger because you know there's a big emotional toll for siblings that have to you know live in a household with a child with with special needs

122and they become their siblings greatest advocate but at the same time they sometimes feel like everything's always about their siblings so you know they sometimes fall through the cracks we don't mean for it to happen but it just does sometimes we have children that require a lot of our attention so I think this is a really important virtual training to make sure parents are aware and it is virtual which I think will make the access for people who maybe can't get there in person so I don't I'm hoping that it'll be you know the parents of the district will find it to be really valuable so that's all I have. Janay? I don't have anything thank you. Thank you. Jesse? Yeah I just want to take a second to thank Ms. Foy and Dr. Fiorello

123for their presentation about chronic absenteeism as we know chronic absenteeism is an epidemic in this country in this state alone not just in our district but in the district that gets almost 1.4 billion dollars in aid they have this same problem even at a higher level than we do that's really just a way for me to say that's not right that Newark gets 1.4 billion dollars in aid and to thank our staff for the exceptional work that they do another thing that I got is this last weekend was the New Jersey scholastic K through 8 state wrestling tournament and two of our eighth graders finished in fourth place Luca Di Gennaro and Noah Ziobro and we also had a seventh grader Jackson Coleman who finished on the podium also so it was a very successful

124year Mr. Shrek and Mr. Tumbleson do a great job and in partnership with the community these kids went and represented for the youth team but they also wrestle at the high school and to remind everybody Luca Di Gennaro was the tri-county champion this year so it's good up-and-coming things and appreciate the work that these teachers do on a day-to-day basis the coaches after school I think our administrators especially people like Dr. Siri who's here late at all board meetings even it's not at her school so thank you very much and I appreciate Ronnie and Jody and the work you guys do and look forward to the continuing work with that it was a pleasure to approve your contract tonight thank you very much thank you Jesse mr. singer I just wanted to recognize and say

125thank you to both the district and the foundation from MERS for continuing the hate ends now cattle car and artifact exhibit it was a really impactful exhibit for those who were able to attend the last time we were able to do it so I was really appreciative to see that it's coming back again in the near future and that's it for me thank you thank you Kelly I would just like to say I know the last meeting was the start of read across America week so later that week I was able to read it a few of the schools I know all of the principals invited us so I just would like to thank mrs. Orlando mrs. Tice and mrs. Camuro I was able to get to those three schools it's always a great experience

126to be around all the different schools see all the kids and just one more thing I think we missed I just wanted to congratulate mr. Moretz on his retirement and thank you for your service of 33 years to our district thank you just a quick thank you to Nicole Ronnie and their staffs for the budget obviously we know how much work was into it we appreciate it I think I didn't say that earlier so just wanted to tack that on now so thank you very much thank you yes I will echo those sentiments to Nicole Ronnie and and the team for all the hard work and effort that goes into preparing this and being on top of it and getting us you know to where we are and again hopefully I know it's it's a

127constant battle and of you know just always moving and pivoting and shifting and trying to you know stay ahead of what the curve and what's coming so it's it's a constant effort and we appreciate that so thank you for that and great work a couple of things wanted to just bring up also is the spring pep rally men's spring pep rally coming up April 10th I think you probably all got an invitation to that from mr. Sincata so hopefully if anyone's able to make it that'd be great it's always fun Dave do we just email Sincata back or we let Nicole or you know or how do you want us to do that all right you got it okay if you can make it it's a pretty cool thing I forgot to mention that it

128is a pretty cool event I know that me and Dave who schedules allowed and were able to go was pretty good yeah yeah I've been to a couple of them in the past also wanted to congratulate we had a student it was a first-place winner in the music composition contest at the 2026 New Jersey Association for gifted children so big congrats to that student it's really you know it makes our district really proud when you know we see our students go out there and really do exceptional things and stand out among large groups of students from across the state sometimes you know it could be even wider spread than that so great job there and congratulations and I think that is it on my list we are going to Nicole I'm sorry if you have

129anything no microphone okay I have two very quick things I am currently working on my newspaper my newspaper sorry it's late my newsletter I'm not creating a newspaper I don't think anyone read read it so I'm gonna I'm working on my newsletter to send out hopefully in the beginning of April and I have also been working on the end of year mid-year update report on goals and and how we did it on our state it attests with the state that should be coming out like I said the first or second week in April finalizing a few things on that and then don't forget mems's play is coming up at the end of April this year it's going to be the drowsy chaperone which is a reimagined student version of the original tour Tony award-winning musical

130so we are very very excited for that and if you've never seen a mems play you should absolutely see a mems play you will think that you're on Broadway even how you get the tickets you have to get the tickets online and you sign up for the seat that you want it's very high-tech and their plays are absolutely phenomenal and the children put a lot of work into it as well as those that chaperone it and oversee it so and including actually our maintenance department that makes most of the sets so very cool it's a whole district endeavor is it all right thank you okay we are going to move into our workshop on the governance committee that was researched and worked on by a few board members and mr. Kane mr. Capric mr. Singer

131and Mrs. Parisi so I want to first thank the four of you for taking on that role and and you know putting in the time and energy to help you know work through this and help help help the board come to a conclusion on what structure seems to be the most productive for the group that we have and you know based on our district size and how we function whether or not we should be looking to make any changes to our structure from the current committee of the whole to a standing committee structure or some or a hybrid version I'm gonna pass it over to mr. Kane who helped lead that group and can kind of give us maybe a summary of what your the conclusion you guys came to yeah sure absolutely so the

132four of us met twice Merced prepared fantastically detailed minutes which you all saw so you see the blow-by-blow of the meetings we prepared the the report that was circulated last Monday and is attached to the agenda here of course just very quickly we put in an overview of the different types of governance structures so committee of the whole committees and a hybrid which kind of blend the first two we described the current structure we put in a ton of research that merced did about other comparable school districts and the types of structures that they follow including committees that they may use then we listed out a whole bunch of advantages and disadvantages that we had talked about collectively with the four of us on the phone we tried to do that per structure to talk

133about which which had each pros and pro and con and then again merced had done a lot of research on best practices we listed them all out here and he had excellent citations there and then I'm just going quickly because of the time obviously here but in section 9 we had our recommendations so we spent we spent a fair amount of time talking about it and essentially we developed what we think is kind of a compromise that blends hopefully the best of all worlds and our suggestion is a hybrid structure where we continue a committee of the whole which we have now but we add some standing committees I think we've technically had those in our policies or some standing committees in our policy for years but we haven't really used them so our suggestion

134is to develop a limited number of standing committees we're suggesting in the range of two to four so that's a manageable number and something that is able to be balanced with board members time and the actual tasks that we can accomplish you know I think we feel that the actual committees what they are what their topics are should be for board discussion but we did to get the conversation started we suggested a finance and by the way this is also based on feedback from committee members and others on the board finance budget committee a policy governance committee a facilities committee and that would essentially subsume what's already being done with the referendum and that would continue on from there out and then a safety security transportation committee that would at least in part take over

135what the accident review committee currently does which I think Christine may be the sole member of at this point so we'd have to build that one up so again I think that's a discussion whether or not everyone agrees with the hybrid structure and what number of committees we want to have and whether or not we agree with any or all of those topics being the committees and I think just collectively wanted to flag a couple other things before we turn to that discussion which is every committee really should require legit work and I think before we pull the trigger on creating committees we should recognize that it is showing up at meetings so that's devoting at least probably another hour or so every month to this but more importantly having an agenda which means we're

136thinking about it in advance and we're coming up with topics that we're going to talk about and then someone's going to create minutes take those minutes make them detailed similar to what Merced did for both of our meetings and distribute those within a reasonable period of time afterwards so that the entire board knows what's being talked about at each committee meeting because there should never be a time where a committee is meeting a minority of the board is meeting and talking about something in depth for perhaps months and months and the rest of the board doesn't know about it I think there's a lot of obvious reasons why that's not a great thing so I think everyone has to accept that there's going to be real work involved if we're going to go to committees

137it's not just appearing it's also doing work so let's certainly consider that in the calculation here and then last couple of things we we think we'd have to update the policy at 0155 if we're going to change structures or if we're going to create new standing committees and we can happily we've kind of started a little bit on that we can continue to work on that we're also suggesting updating the board goals and creating a strategic plan that would align to what those committees are going to do and then again periodically reviewing the structure if we change it at least annually to make sure that it's working if we have standing committees to make sure that they're actually productive and we're actually achieving things and seeing if we need to bend or change modify in

138any way so I think that's the high-level summary you guys want to add anything onto it first and foremost Dave did a great job chairing this this committee so kudos to you for doing that whatever committee I'm going to be on if we do go this route I want Marsad as my scribe because he did a phenomenal job keeping track of what we discussed and you know kudos to you for that I just think that that you know proof is in the pudding right and and the research that was done which was well thought out details a plan and a path for us to move to a more productive more productive environment for the board and like Dave said you know it's gonna it's gonna be more work and there's gonna be people held the

139task to to get that work done but I think if we if we can iron out all the policies procedures and such I think this could be something positive for the board I think the idea of having less than four is a good move we don't want to stretch ourselves too thin but I was pleased to be a part of it I was pleased regardless of the outcome whether it was was something I agree with or not I was pleased that the fact that we were able to put together the pros and cons and give everybody what I think is a clear picture of of what's out there and and what could benefit our our board as a whole so thank you the only thing that I would want to add in terms of a

140step between what we had said in terms of codifying what those committees are and then moving towards actually holding meetings outside of creating agendas for you know upcoming meetings for each of those committees is essentially established establishing charters for each of those committees things that identify what the purpose of those committees are what the goals would be for that particular let's say school year or calendar year for it for each of those committees and how those committees plan to meet whether they'd be on a monthly quarterly cadence in person virtual who would need to be involved in each of those committees so a little bit of pre-work to establishing those committees before they actually can start meeting please I love what you're saying and I would like to just add to it from from a

141district perspective also a way for the other board members to communicate ideas sometimes I get questions like hey have you thought about this how do you thought about this and I think if it aligns to the committee work then the question shouldn't come to me first it comes to the committee and then the committee determines if they want to move forward with that idea or not this way I mean you know I may know the committee's working over here on this but it hasn't gotten to the full board yet over here and then I'm trying to navigate that well do I tell what's my role so I think a clear delineation of you have an idea you go to the committee the committee brings it to the full committee comes back I think our suggestion

142would be when we revise or if we go down this route we revise policy zero one five five we incorporate something like that in the policy directly we can continue to create this policy as the board gives a consensus on what we want to do but I think we can build something like that into her just piggybacking what Dr. Santora said and what Dave said is there a way that if you know an idea comes about that it comes to the board and then the president then dictates okay that that would be referred to the finance committee finance committee have at it and run with it I think that would maybe a better angle as opposed to someone just emailing committee number one and saying hey I'd like to do this and then they decide

143whether or not they should do it because the way the format is right now is we bring up an idea in this in this setting and it would be for the president to say okay Eric that's a great idea your committee is now going to research that and bring it to us so that everybody is aware of what's being brought as opposed to someone going directly to that committee yeah I don't know I get what you're saying and I think it makes sense and and I do think before and again I want to thank everyone for for the time and thought that's gone into this and I think there's going to be quite a bit more before we make any changes if we make any changes but to your point yes I think it is

144something that should be determined at first is it some you know if it's because you may have any board member at any time may have questions related to any topic that may reasonably deserve a pretty you know quick response and it might be readily available right so we'd also want to delay you know information from circulating because it's going through this process when it's a simple you know trying to just get yourself up to speed about a policy or how do we do this or how do you know things of that nature typically a lot of what currently happens right so I don't want to completely detract from that but I think I think we do need to streamline the process so we're not always constantly bombarding Nicole with you know day after day after

145day of questions and back-and-forth email change and whatnot right a lot of those things should fall into potentially these committees right and as my son pointed out these committees do need to really be very well defined and and have a charter right and have really goal set so we know what is the purpose so we know exactly what falls in that criteria of this committee right so if it's not an it may be part of that same topic but it's not really part of the goal of what this committee is doing then we're not going to keep throwing things out that committee that don't fall into those goals right then we're I think you know misusing it and abusing it but you know please can I ask that well I wanted to add and then

146ask a question I agree with what you're saying because I feel like we do need a protocol if we're gonna go down that route but I think if it's like now like we're we're like I don't want to use the word forbidden but like to be able to cut off everybody's access to be able to freely like we have to put it through the board president and he'll put it out to everybody I feel like it's it's becomes too much so but I do agree that we need to streamline you know if we're gonna go this route that we need to have some kind of parameters but I feel like we need to be careful with that because like you said it might be a quick question and we should be able to send an

147email wherever about without inundating so I think like we need to really think about that so there's that my other thing you know I saw amazing notes Mercer really you should come to my class and give a lesson on how to take amazing notes but it was detailed and I do agree that if we if we go this route it would be important that there is an agenda that there is you know in depth notes because you know we're all putting our trust in each other that you're gonna go to this committee and you're gonna relay this back to us and listen we're not all spring chickens right like we might forget things so if we have everything really detailed we can go back nobody misses something oh I thought I told you but you

148know I was left out of the conversation so that we'll kind of make sure everyone's on the same page at the same time so that no one's in the dark so I do I think that if we do this route that's really got to be like it's got to be a hard this or or it's not going to work my my other question or concern would be how we make sure if we have two committees only and there's nine of us how do we split that if we have four how do we split that and to make sure there's equal distribution because in the past when we've had these ad hoc committees we had people that were on multiple committees and some that were on none and I know this was in the past I'm

149going you know a few years back but how do we make sure that the distribution is fair and I understand that some of that in the past with the ad hoc was who's available during the day and who's not right like obviously I can't take off from work I teach so that was a no-brainer but how do we make sure that everybody you know is included and and who gets what they want and all that I think really needs to be taken into consideration because I think if we go this route it it could it could be an enhancement to what we do but I think we just need to make sure we think about all these things that's all I got so I couldn't agree more yeah Jesse no go ahead today oh today

150yeah thank you um I forget where exactly I saw it but I saw something where we would continue to have you know like our action meeting and then there'd be like a workshop meeting potentially also can can you explain like a little bit more what we would cover then in that meeting is it everybody just meeting on the commit what we've discussed in committees right so yeah essentially so like right now tonight is an action meeting and our next meeting is labeled as a workshop meeting and that's something I think still to be determined if we could if we go forward with creating some of these standing committees whether or not are we having those two typical two meetings a month like we normally do have and I'm not sure if you guys how you

151guys you know thought about that or if that really got worked into the recommendation as to you know how that would work can I just say my concern which I think I said last time and then um my my only concern is when it comes to hiring because if we go to one meeting a month like usually they're they're supposed to be committee meetings and then we say okay we really need to hire someone for this position so I don't want the government on a delay yeah I don't want the governance structure to delay having certified teachers and classrooms things that are necessary yeah right and I think you know and again there's more to be thought about but in situations like that or in districts that are standing committees and generally only have one

152meeting a month and the rest are committee meetings so should they need to I assume at any time right they can call for let's say what we call an emergency meeting even though it's not truly an emergency but in a lot of the districts the superintendent has hiring rates which I had during COVID and that hiring to continue right okay can I jump in on that please so for the workshops so yes it would be kind of a meeting with no agenda right where we just have topics for discussion it could be issues that have been referred out to committee they're gonna be addressed in larger detail by the entire board or it could be something that's not sent to the foot to a committee that just needs to be addressed by the board like

153we're having this discussion here this is kind of like a workshop session we would just have an entire meeting devoted to you anywhere between one and whatever number of topics that we want to discuss more informally there's usually not a camera we've had those probably once a year for the last three years but they used to be once a month so in the report we put that we don't know that we need one once a month it seems a little much and I remember years ago when we've had them every month sometimes we'd show up and there'd be nothing to discuss so there'd be one thing to discuss for 20 minutes so our feeling was at least quarterly we should have one in which we kind of collect a group of topics together you know

154the board president and superintendent kind of get a list of topics together from the board members for discussion and it doesn't have to be any more than quarterly but if we need it more often we can do it but I think we should have it at least once a quarter which is once every three months it's not that much but this way we don't get in the way of having action meetings and doing things that need to be done yeah I think that would be beneficial because I feel like right now it's very hard to do the way that our our agendas are jam-packed so it is very hard to I feel like to have productive conversations amongst all of us right I feel like a lot is getting done via email and then obviously

155have to make sure that you're not including everybody so I think it's hard I think that would alleviate a lot of that you know working in silos and maybe overlapping with each other so I think that that would be good can I ask a question that goes off of what what you guys are just talking about so if we were gonna do a workshop let's say once a quarter so does that mean we still keep the two action meetings a month and in the quarter one of those action meetings becomes a workshop or we only have one meeting a month every month except for that quarter yeah in my imagination it really is up to these guys I don't set the meeting schedule or anything but it would be continuing to action meetings a month

156whenever we need them and just somewhere along the way one of what otherwise is an action becomes a workshop for when they don't have things that need to be done so we would find at least one per quarter that we can have a non-agenda okay so does that make sense to me because I going on what you're saying if you look at our agendas every time there's so much stuff on it so if we wound up having to put that all into one meeting like I feel like we'd have problems so so the other thing if you look at I said I think everyone should have the board meeting schedule and I we keep it updated at every meeting that was supposed to be committee turned into an action this year but there's also very

157few meetings that don't have other things attached them whether they be presentations the state of schools so one of the things that I had started was doing the state of schools where each department comes in and does a presentation if we went to less meetings I'd be very concerned about district operations and then also would we scale back on those public reports because that works being done in committee you know would I not have if you have a security committee would I not have mr. heckle come to a board meeting and present to the whole community because he's already meeting with the security committee and they're relaying the information so I think that all would have to be worked out too because if you're gonna besides the agenda part I'm looking at these presentations it's

158like on those days we would be here till 2 in the morning and I think one other thing to point out is if we're depending on the committees we have and I feel like some committees might need to meet more frequently than others depending on like let's say transportation safety whatever if there's you know bus accidents or different things might require that committee to meet a little bit more frequently than maybe one of the other committees so if we were dropping down to just the one meeting a month because we were having committee meetings not all committees are gonna meet monthly so that you know I feel like that's something to think about as well yeah yeah I think clearly there's quite a bit to still be thought about and considered and you know and

159I think you know that lends itself just to a lot of the topics at times that you know our ideas some of us may have right and you know in theory it sounds great and something we'd love to just jump on top of and jump right into right but you know it we need to make sure that we're being we're doing our due diligence right before trying to make changes or move in different directions and and you know understand the implications good bed everything weigh it out which is why you know part of why we form this committee to help you know determine that so yeah we don't want to jump into anything especially when changing something that we're very accustomed to doing so you know I think right now we're going to continue the

160status quo and start to you know continue to share ideas and work on how do we move towards this implementation if that's what the board wants to do Danielle yeah I just wanted to add for the board's consideration obviously I work with many boards who work on the committee structure so with that in mind I know Merced had mentioned you know charters for the purposes of each committee I'm happy to share some of those materials just for the committee's consideration and it's a lot of the popular ones that I deal with so policy committee personnel buildings and grounds all the usual suspects that I think would be useful to you all so I'm happy to share and help you guys work on the process thank you yeah I'm sure that'd be helpful Jesse yeah I

161was gonna ask about the meeting schedule how that would adjust this and that right not that it pertains to any of the buddy on the sitting board but in the past like I know that I've had several discussions with the president of the vice president about effort given by board members and I think this is a way to give a board member accountability and a must to work as a whole to be contributing to the success because we're only as successful as the sum of your least contributing individual so I didn't mean that against anybody here I hope that everybody understands that I appreciate all the due diligence that goes into planning and the comments and the dialogue that we have back and forth it's evident that that is happening can't just show up and

162talk you know I'm saying and I think though that if we don't make some kind of adjustment then we fall into a complacent nature and I think that's what's happened in surrounding areas around us as they have became complacent in the status quo that's why I can appreciate why I don't agree with Eric's call for a strategic plan in the next couple of years it's a valid discussion point and I think that having small groups or committees to have those discussions leads to a more fruitful discussion so that's what I'm saying it's gonna be a lot of work I'm not kidding myself I know that Dave has heard me say this for years certain individuals do a lot of stuff a lot of other individuals just sit there and do nothing and look if you're

163not doing nothing I know we don't get a paycheck but this will expose you for not doing what you're supposed to be doing and when reelection time comes you'll know who's doing what and who's not doing what so just want to say my piece in regard to that thank you just I can't turn this did anyone else have Ronnie as we always do in the spring we have our annual reorganization meeting where we re-adopt all the policies we renew all the contracts and everything for next year that is scheduled for the May 19th that is also the meeting where we post the meeting agenda schedule for the next school year so I I'm gonna have to put something on at that point whether it's a draft that we modify after just you know once things

164are settled out but I do have to put something on and we do have people that need to know when bills are being paid because the contractors and something I just need to kind of keep everybody in the loop on the bill list schedules because they know they need to submit stuff to the architect in order to be paid by a certain date so we do send the schedule out to a lot of vendors so it's important that we kind of settle that out yeah I think no matter what we're not we're not gonna you know take any we're not gonna take any measures or any changes you know that's gonna dramatically or drastically impact delaying any of the processes particularly in paying vendors or anything of that nature and I think something to keep

165in mind too that whatever decision we do and whatever changes we might make they're not written in stone and they're not you know necessarily have to stay that way forever but that being said if anyone else does anyone else have anything else I just wanted to add one thing that I didn't note in addition to standing committees we'd obviously still retain the right and probably would have to use ad hoc committees at time for things like negotiations or whatnot so yeah I realized I don't want to make the focus only standing committees we would also presumably still have ad hoc committees for you know things that are singular in nature that need to be researched and brought back but aren't ongoing you know indefinitely right that goes without saying yeah Jenna I mean typically the

166ad hoc communities are you know for shorter term projects that have an expiration date and then those dissolve and they'll always be a need for that and something that will continue doing and in the meantime I'd like to keep this committee in existence for the time being as we continue to evaluate this and try to you know work towards the next steps so if everyone's good with holding their roles in that position I'll check with Mrs. Parisi if she's good with it and you know we'll continue to keep plugging away. Our next meeting actually is supposed to be a committee meeting and the we have another agenda meeting the next week so I think that we could probably hold that as a committee meeting that being said if you want to follow up on this

167right now I was going to present on the performance of the district but that's all I have right now. At the next meeting? Yeah so that's the only thing right now for that agenda? Yeah so it's one of those things are we gonna have the meeting are we not gonna have the meeting it's also Pinebrook's concert right so if there are things about this topic we actually do have scheduled time for April 14th. Right okay okay yeah just keep me posted on what you want to do because I can always yeah I mean I think you know we'll have to see if we make it you know that much headway that there's really a purpose you know because it's not that far away and then in spring break is in between that time too so

168and I won't be here so. Mr. President what's the next course of action for this topic? I think the you know I'd like to have a discussion with both the committee chair and some individual board pretty much all the individual board members to really you know gauge everyone's sense of the direction as well as prioritizing what committees they feel are you know should be prioritized and made a part of this and maybe it's where we try to start with one or start with two before we go to three or four if we even get that far so I think you know we want to continue that conversation and start to really get everyone's you know where the where one's heads at. Thank you. Yep anything else anyone? All right believe that's it yep all right

169do a motion to adjourn Mr. Singer and Mr. Tissetti thank you